Hacker News with Generative AI: Database Systems

Learning about Serializability Theory (siemens.blog)
I’ve been reading Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems as part of Phil Eaton’s software internals book club. I’m currently working my way through the third chapter on two phase locking (2PL). I’ve had some light exposure to transaction serializability and 2PL in the past. I even wrote a toy transaction scheduler complete with strict 2PL and deadlock detection using a wait-die algorithm for victim selection.
Database Systems, Concurrency Control, Software Development, Transaction Processing
3 points by grep_it 7 days ago | 0 comments
Beyond Quacking: Deep Integration of Language Models and RAG into DuckDB (arxiv.org)
Knowledge-intensive analytical applications retrieve context from both structured tabular data and unstructured, text-free documents for effective decision-making.
Database Systems
108 points by PaulHoule 46 days ago | 15 comments
Query Engines: Gatekeepers of the Parquet File Format (duckdb.org)
TL;DR: Mainstream query engines do not support reading newer Parquet encodings, forcing systems like DuckDB to default to writing older encodings, thereby sacrificing compression.
Database Systems, Data Formats, Performance, Compression, Query Engines
32 points by tosh 114 days ago | 1 comments
Scalable OLTP in the Cloud: What's the Big Deal? (blogspot.com)
This paper is from Pat Helland, the apostate philosopher of database systems, overall a superb person, and a good friend of mine. The paper appeared this week at CIDR'24. (Check out the program for other interesting papers). The motivating question behind this work is: "What are the asymptotic limits to scale for cloud OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) systems?" Pat says that the CIDR 2023 paper "Is Scalable OLTP in the Cloud a Solved Problem?" prompted this question.
Database Systems, Cloud Computing, Scalability
93 points by SchwKatze 117 days ago | 49 comments
Nulls: Revisiting null representation in modern columnar formats (dl.acm.org)
Nulls are common in real-world data sets, yet recent research on columnar formats and encodings rarely address Null representations.
Data Representation, Database Systems, Data Management, Columnar Formats, Null Values
54 points by tosh 205 days ago | 6 comments
Designing a Query Execution Engine (trychroma.com)
Distributed Chroma is a multi-tenant system. Query and Compactor nodes serve queries and build indexes for multiple tenants. By leveraging multi-tenancy we can maximize utilization of nodes in our system, resulting in lower costs for our users. However, building with multi-tenancy in mind presents the challenge of how to optimally structure, dispatch, and schedule work such that resources are fairly used across all tenants.
Database Systems, Query Optimization, Software Architecture, Distributed Systems
41 points by jeffchuber 205 days ago | 0 comments
A Deep Dive into German Strings (cedardb.com)
“Strings are Everywhere”! At least according to a 2018 DBTest Paper from the Hyper team at Tableau. In fact, strings make up nearly half of the data processed at Tableau. This high prevalence undoubtedly applies to many other companies as well, as the paper’s dataset consists of data analyzed by Tableau’s users. The string-heavy nature of the data makes string processing one of the most important tasks of a database system.
Database Systems, String Processing, Data Analysis, German
10 points by tosh 212 days ago | 6 comments
The Untold Story of SQLite (2021) (corecursive.com)
Database Systems, History, Software
80 points by usernamesdf 280 days ago | 25 comments
Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance [pdf] (cidrdb.org)
Database Systems, Performance, Disk-Based Systems
55 points by itunpredictable 386 days ago | 24 comments